I'm back!

Okay, I'm back to being able to post from time to time. Got a new job that gives me downtime in front of a computer where I can blog occasionally (along with an unfiltered internet connection!).

Anyway, I'll begin working on some other posts soon, but for now I just wanted to say "I'm back!"

News from the WAR front

Oh I'm so clever with my post titles.

Anyway, two big points of information on Warhammer Online, one of them bad and one of them good.

First I'll start with the Bad News: Mark Jacobs announced that WAR has been delayed to a potential release date of Q3 2008. This is disappointing, but altogether not unexpected, news to me. While obviously I was hoping to enjoy WAR sooner rather than later, I really didn't expect it to get released in Q2. As we were coming into the new year, all the information coming out of Beta on WAR's progress made it seem like a Q2 release date was unlikely. Though, with the rate they've been progressing, I believe a Q3 release date is possible, but even if it gets pushed back to Q4, that's fine. I'd rather have a good game later than a bad game now.

Then there's the Good News: Collector's Edition is now available for Preorder! Okay, first off we'll touch on what we get for just getting the Collector's Edition. There's the usual gamut of stuff, like Art books and little pretty things like figurines and whatnot. Then there's the interesting stuff... the in-game stuff:

• Twelve unique heads available to CE people only. Two for each race... one male and one female except Greenskins who are all male, so it'll probably be a unique Orc head and a unique Goblin head.
• The Libram of Insight: An item that you can use that has three charges. Each time you use a charge you get a 10% bonus modifier to XP gained, and each charge lasts for an hour.
• The final bonus is really the icing on the cake that ensured that I would get the CE: Twelve unique quests only available to those who have the Collector's Edition. One PvE and One PvP quest per race (though available to anyone on that faction). I expect these quests to be low level, so the rewards don't have a huge impact on endgame. Either way, each quest comes with a title that will be unique to those who have the CE. Honestly, even if these quests had no rewards or titles, it would still be enough for me to want it just for more quests!

Now, all this would have been more than enough (hell a non-combat pet is enough for me to get the WoW CEs). But that's not enough for EA Mythic. They are also giving you, if you preorder it:

• Guaranteed access to the Open Beta for WAR.
• A "Live game head start". They don't really clarify how this will work. Either you will be able to keep your Open Beta Characters or you will be able to start playing WAR on the normal servers a few days early. Either way, it's pretty damn sweet.

Finally two more in-game items:

• The "Rittenbach's Portable Camp" which allows you to "Rest your weary soul and heal your wounds between battles" whatever the hell that means.
• One of three "Bands" (rings?) with different names and effects depending on which store you preorder the CE from. They will all "increase your stats" and give you a buff that gives you a chance to do a certain type of damage. The catch is all these bands are only usable in PvE. Sounds fine by me.

Anyway, I'm totally sold on this. Not that I wasn't already, but now I really am! WOOO WAR!

New BoJ bought reward comparisons

As I promised before, with the new patch out, I'm going to detail the new BoJ rewards and compare them to the previous ones of the same slot.

First up is the easiest one, IMO: Feet.

New Badge item:
Blue's Greaves of the Righteous Guardian: Plate Feet, 1212 Armor, 58 STA, 34 Shield Block Rating, 23 Spell Hit Rating, 26 Spell Damage, Red Socket, 3 STA Socket Bonus

This is compared to the previous choice of:
Sabatons of the Righteous Defender: Plate Feet, 1105 Armor, 45 STA, 18 Defense Rating, 18 Spell Hit Rating, 30 Shield Block Value, 23 Spell Damage, Red/Blue Sockets, 4 STA Socket Bonus

Opinion: The new Blue's Greaves are almost a total upgrade compared to the Sabatons. They have more armor, base stamina, a socket that can be socketed either for +9 or +12 STA (assuming you only use blue quality gems), more spell hit rating, and a ton of crush avoidance (though only through Shield Block Rating). One of the reasons I hadn't upgraded from my Boots of Elusion to the Sabatons is due to how much crush avoidance I'd lose. But with how much Shield Block Rating the Greaves have (over 4% at 70) this makes this a non-issue and actually gives me more crush avoidance so I can shed some of my other gear elsewhere. Maybe get some more Expertise Rating. The only situation where the Sabatons are better than the Greaves is when you are treading water on Defense Rating and picking up the Greaves would drop you under 490.

Next up is Waist:

New Badge item:
Girdle of the Fearless: Plate Waist, 904 Armor, 58 STA, 34 Defense Rating, 23 Hit Rating, 22 Expertise Rating, Red Socket, 3 STA Socket Bonus

This is compared to the two previous options of:

Girdle of the Protector: Plate Waist, 904 Armor, 40 STA, 11 Defense Rating, 27 Dodge Rating, 18 Spell Hit Rating, 23 Spell Damage Yellow/Blue Sockets, 4 STA Socket Bonus

or

Iron-Tusk Girdle: Plate Waist, 904 Armor, 45 STA, 21 Defense Rating, 33 Dodge Rating, Yellow/Blue Sockets, 3 Dodge Rating Socket Bonus

Opinion: This one is a no-brainer. While overall you lose out on avoidance, the Girdle of the Fearless has Expertise. Expertise is (IMO) the best of the non-necessary stats. Even with how much I rant and rave about Spell Hit, I would drop every point of Spell Hit I have for more Expertise. Plus the Girdle of the Fearless has some benefits beyond just Expertise. It has more Stamina, even after gemming up, and the regular Hit Rating will allow for less Avenger's Shield and Righteous Defense misses.


As for the Leg slot, we have two options at our disposal:
Inscribed Legplates of the Aldor: Plate Legs, 1406 Armor, 78 STA, 25 Defense Rating, 43 Dodge Rating, 37 Spell Damage, Red/Yellow Sockets, 4 STA Socket Bonus

Sunguard Legplates: Plate Legs, 1406 Armor, 78 STA, 43 Defense Rating, 35 Dodge Rating, 23 Expertise Rating, Red/Blue Sockets, 3 Dodge Rating Socket Bonus

Compared to the old:
Unwavering Legguards: Plate Legs, 1406 Armor, 73 STA, 22 Defense Rating, 30 Shield Block Rating, 59 Shield Block Value, Red/Yellow/Blue Socket, 6 STA Socket Bonus

Opinion: While the Unwavering Leggauards have more crush avoidance than any other single piece of armor, if you've already reached crush avoidance they lose some of their luster (but still have value since you can use their high crush avoidance to replace other slots). But when compared to the Sunguard Legplates, they just pale in comparison, due to the high STA, good avoidance and of course Expertise. In fact, I would say that the Sunguard Legplates are currently the second best tanking legs in the game (including compared to T6). The only ones that top them are the ridiculous awesomeness that are the Felstrength Legplates (drop from Brutalis in Sunwell Plateau).

Finally is the hardest part to decide on... the Chest slot:

Shattrath Protectorate Breastplate: Plate Chest, 1765 Armor, 78 STA, 26 Defense Rating, 34 Spell Hit Rating, 60 Spell Damage, Blue Socket, 2 Dodge Rating Socket Bonus

Chestplate of Stoicism: Plate Chest, 1765 Armor, 78 STA, 51 Defense Rating, 34 Dodge Rating, 39 Shield Block Value, Red Socket, 3 STA Socket Bonus

These are compared to the:

Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian: Plate Chest, 1607 Armor, 60 STA, 22 Defense Rating, 38 Dodge Rating, 35 Spell Damage, Red/Yellow/Blue Sockets, 6 STA Socket bonus

Opinion: This one is a lot more complex than it looks. With only a quick glance it looks like the Shattrath Protectorate Breastplate is much better (it does have a very nice amount of Spell Damage and Spell Hit Rating). It's quite easy to overlook the benefits of the Chestplate of Stoicism. Look at the numbers on the Chestplate: 51 Defense Rating and 34 Dodge Rating. Combined that's over 4.3% straight avoidance. There are few pieces that beat that much avoidance.

So which is better? Honestly, I'd say the Chestplate is since that much avoidance will allow us to aim for other gear more easily. But that doesn't mean that the Shattrath Protectorate Breastplate is worthless. It's tied with the Heroic Judicator's Chestguard (a drop from Sunwell Plateau) for the most spell damage on a single piece of Plate armor. After you pick up all the other pieces, getting the Shattrath Protectorate Breastplate would be a good move for a 5-man/heroic or threat building set.

Though on one final note for the chest pieces, the Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian is a happy balance between the two. If you find yourself needing more spell damage, but don't want to give up a lot of avoidance to get it (like you would with the Shattrath Protectorate Breastplate), the Chestguard is a viable option.

Also all the additional avoidance and Defense Rating that these pieces will give will allow easier access to other slots, such as the Broach of Deftness, and the Shapeshifter's Signet, both of which are nice and tasty sources of Expertise but are sorely lacking in the "normal" tanking stats.

Anyway, enjoy the list.

Inside World of Warcraft - Episode 1

Generally I'm not much of one for machinima, outside of RvB, but I saw this linked somewhere and I was just dying laughing. Seriously... laughing so hard I cried and my jaw started to hurt.

EDIT: "It's like an orgasm on the surface of the Sun!" is my new statement for something that is amazing. I love that quote so very much. It's just so utterly ridiculous.

Re-do of my Pre-Karazhan gear list

Since it seems a fair amount of folks are still looking at it and using it as a guideline, I redid my Pre-Karazhan list. Even if you're an old hat at Paladin tanking, give it a gander. Link is over on the side bar.

WSG: Blizzard's failure of a BG

Obvious preface: WSG being a failure of a BG is my opinion, not a fact. Anything said here that you think might be an opinion and is stated like a fact is an opinion.

This weekend I took a little time and played my Druid. He's at 49 and I was taking some time to do PvP to get gear to help me out from fifty to fifty-eight. Not like I needed it, but PvP can be fun, so why not do something fun and get some rewards from it, right?

So I respecced to a resto build (was feral) did some AB and got the Highlander's Lizardhide Boots (for faster running in WSG). After this I started doing WSG for some of the rewards there... Over a few days the week before I had gotten the badges I needed for the healer cape, and did three more games. Those last three games lasted about forty-five minutes to an hour each.

This showed me the major flaw for WSG: Stalemates. This isn't really a huge revelation, but this is the first time I've really been effected by it. All three of the games I mentioned above were long games that happened not because both sides were effective in defending our flag from being taken, but because both sides would get the flag and then be able to effectively defend it. This problem stems from, I believe, a lack of foresight on Blizzard's part concerning the differences between FPSs and WoW. For most examples I will compare WSG with TF2, since I have played a fair amount of TF2 (compared to other multi-player FPSs with a CTF style stage).

First, the most obvious difference is player-controlled health and how healing works. In WSG, an intelligent healer (or two, if the flag carrier [FC] is really lucky) can keep the FC alive through pretty much anything. I've seen cases where two healers were able to keep the FC alive through an onslaught of the entire other team, while two or three of the DPS FC-defenders crushed the attackers under their heel. In addition, the ability to control and increase your health to levels making you close to, if not unkillable (with healing and, in limited cases, without), independent of your class (high DPS clothies with over 10,000 health?).

TF2 is an entirely different situation. With preset healing and health it means that you know what you're facing when going up against someone. If you see a Demoman and a Heavy coming at you, you know to shoot the Demoman first since they will die more quickly. and Also, in TF2, you can't heal yourself. Take the Medic in TF2, who can quickly heal others, and has a slow regeneration effect, but has no self heals. So focused fire on the healers can actually do something, unlike WoW where focused fire might kill them... if they aren't a Paladin or a Druid, or don't have any backup, or... well you get what I'm getting at. There's a way to equalize the advantage good healing gives in TF2, but it's not guaranteed in WSG.

These are just some examples of the problem, which is Blizzard didn't have foresight when it came to making a BG. It seems very much to me that when it came time to design the BGs, they put a lot of thought into making AV, and then realized maybe they should make another, a smaller one. So they started to brain storm that. Someone then thought... "Hey... people like playing 'Capture the Flag', right? Why not make a BG for that?" And it was generally agreed that it was a good idea. But without the limitations that most FPS designers place on the players, it's far less controlled, and leads to situations like I listed above, with players being able to stalemate the game for hours.

Does this mean that WSG is unfixable? Of course not. Nothing is beyond fixing, but it requires an ample change on the basic design to make it so that things like stalemates are not possible. Blizzard could take the simple way out and just make it so that you don't need to have your own flag to turn in your opponents, but this would make WSG very much like old AV, where it was a race to see who finishes first. You would have one person (most likely a Feral Druid) who's the FC, and everyone else guards them, as both sides run around and around on the opposite sides, making sure to not be slowed down by getting too close to the other side.

As for how to fix it? I'm not really sure, but the key is making it points based, much like AB and EotS are. Let's say both sides start at zero. Every 3 seconds 5 points are added to both sides, independent of the flag. For each kill that's done, that side gets 5 points (this is done to ensure that both sides won't turtle with their flag and cause a tie). For making a flag turn-in you get 500 points, and the goal is to reach 4,000 points. This would not change the mechanics of WSG too much (in fact it might encourage players to fight each other more), while allowing it so that if both sides are turtling, one will emerge the winner after a preset amount of time (discounting the points from killing and flag turn-ins, a game would end after 40 minutes (which would be guaranteed to be made shorter if by nothing else than points from killing).

And I'm sure that's not the only option. Does anyone else have ideas on how they could "fix" WSG or any other complaints about it? Or am I misguided in my opinions? Is WSG right the way it is, and if so why?

War(hammer)craft minis?

I'm with Tycho on this one... The fact that Blizzard is making a tabletop strategy game from Warcraft is hilarious, especially in light of all the comments concerning Warhammer Online being a copy of WoW.

WAAAGH!!!!!!

From my previous post, Fedaykin98 asked "Also, would you mind doing a post where you elaborate on your interest in WAR? I'd love to hear more about what attracts you to that game."

This post will ramble a bit, because I'm just going to list them as I think of them.

Note: In any podcasts I link, they will refer to factions as "Realms" (this is leftover from DAoC with the three realms of Albion, Hibernia, and Midgard). This sounds confusing to my ears since when I think of "realm" I think of servers. Just trying to clarify for others who may think like I do.

As far as PvE goes, the thing I'm most looking forward to is the Tome of Knowledge. I linked it in my previous post, but for those who can't go to Curse due to things like work firewalls, I'll detail a bit about it.

The tome will be filled out as you explore and kill stuff. Click on a friendly NPC? Get an entry on it's race. Find a particularly important NPC (such as Tyrion or Teclis of the High Elves or Grimgor Ironhide, the Orc)? Get an entry into your Tome on said person. As you kill mobs of a certain type, you will get bonuses such as a little XP, details on that critter, trophies based on them (kill enough wolves and you could get a wolf skull would be a possible example), or maybe even a bonus when fighting those types of mobs. Finally, as you complete quests and such you'll get entries into your tome, detailing the rise of your character through his or her story. Additionally, the Tome of Knowledge will also have some details on your PvP exploits, but that's a bit less clear.

As clearly detailed by my points above concerning important NPCs is that I love the setting of Warhammer. A few years back I tried getting into playing the Warhammer tabletop game, but I just couldn't. As an ex-military guy, trained in unit tactics, old military concepts like having units in tight formations just seemed stupid to me, especially since many sides had artillery that could be devastating to units setup like this. But I never disliked nor stopped liking the setting. (Interesting side note: While I'm not overly fond of the setting for Warhammer 40,000, I find the mechanics of that tabletop game much more sensible, with units able to spread out.) So being given a chance to play in the Warhammer world in a form that is not directly controlling huge armies appeals to me quite a lot.

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Another huge addition that WAR will add (compared to WoW at least) is an effective way for tanks to play in PvP. This takes two forms: Enemy-based collision detection and PvP taunts which don't directly control the enemy. As comes to no regular reader's surprise, I like tanking. But in WoW PvP you can't tank. Against a rogue or a warrior? He'll just run through you and behind you. What good does a shield do you back there? And stopping people on bridges? Only if you have CC available?

Well in WAR they will have collision detection, so you can actually impede your enemies progress by standing in their way. If you find a chokepoint, you can place a tank there and he can hold the point using a mix of knockbacks and collision detection while others support him and blast from behind him. Thankfully the collision detection only works on your enemies, so your allies can run through each other and you without being slowed down.

As far as PvP taunts go, these are brilliant! It will probably vary from class to class, but the general idea is that it's a buff or debuff that makes all attacks on non-tanks much less powerful. Because of this you have two options: Attack the non-tanks weakly, or attack the tanks at full strength, despite their strong armor. Sure you can choose to ignore them, but that will make things take much longer. It's a taunt that doesn't directly control the enemy, but gives too powerful an effect to ignore.

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As far as PvP goes, as I touched on in my previous post, everything you do matters. Even some little quest where you kill the infamous ten rats will award victory points towards capture of enemy territory. This is detailed in these two podcasts. Unlike WoW, which is an almost eternally unchanging world, what you do has an impact. It will only be a temporary impact, but the impact is there none-the-less.

Let's consider a raid in WoW attack some opposing faction's town. You go in, kill all the guards and populace and keep on, until you get thrown out. Within 5 minutes all the NPCs will be back like nothing ever happened. While I expect a similar thing in WAR for quest-hubs, your actions will help your faction wrest control of an area from your opponent. There will most likely still be a major quest-hub available in that zone, but I would guess that it opens up new quests to the faction that just gained control of said zone, while giving the "old" controllers of the zone an ability to wrest back into control their zone.

Also, as far a quests themselves go, Mythic is making some pretty sensible changes or adding some new cool stuff. For the knitty gritty details check out this podcast. I'll touch on the really cool changes here.

First is the change to kill collector quests aka go kill ten rats (again... oh god again...). Previously, you would need to have the quest before you could actually count the rats as dead. So lets say your wandering through some sewer and you come across a guy surrounded by rats... in fact just to get to the point where you could see the guy, you had to kill a dozen rats, and to get to him you need to kill a dozen more. So you fight through this horde of rats and you stand before him, drenched in rat blood, bits of rat strewn about, and a rat impaled on your sword. It's pretty damn obvious you've been killing rats. So you talk to him and he says "I hate rats. They stole my food. Can you kill those dirty rats for me?" At this point you look at him and say "And what in the seven hells have I been doing for the last few minutes?" Of course that doesn't count because you didn't know you needed to kill rats. So you go out and kill more rats, this time it counts, only to get back and realize that you missed one part of the quest: He wants his food back. Yeah you killed 10 rats but none of them had his food, so you go out and kill more rats until you finally get it, then go back to him.
Well all that is in the past with WAR. Every time you kill a mob, it is marked down in a database (probably related to the tracking of what you kill for the Tome of Knowledge). If you encounter someone who wants you to kill mobs, when you get the quest you will receive credit for what you've already killed. Alright, same situation... you're in the sewers and you find this quest guy. You fight your way through the rats, and he says "I hate rats. They stole my food." and the game checks this database and sees that you've killed ten rats, so the guy then says "Glad to see you've been killing them. So you don't have my food... they must have eaten it. Thanks for trying." and he hands you a reward. Simply put, now the game tracks what you've killed and no more worrying about some stupid drop rate on some random body part that proves you killed a certain mob type.

The other cool part is Public Quests. This is so cool it had half of a very long podcast dedicated to it. It's kinda like a group quest... only they are constantly going and you don't necessarily need to be in the group to participate. They are multi-staged, ending in a big battle where everyone in the area who participated get rewarded. In addition as you participate, even if you can't see these quests to the end, you still build up "Influence" (aka reputation) with a certain reward giver for that Public Quest, this way you can get rewards even if you don't have the time to stick around.
I'll use the example from the podcast for the Greenskins. The Greenskins see the Dwarfs hiding inside of some big fort type place. The Dwarfs know better than to come outside of it, so the Greenskins are left to try to figure out how to get them out. They try bashing the gates down, which doesn't work (duh... Dwarf craftsmanship is second to none), then along came this Giant being bothered by some squigs. So the Greenskins get an idea... first they get the giant drunk (a giant will work for anyone who gets them drinks). So the first job is to kill the squigs at it's feet, then get the Giant some booze and pour it down it's throat. Once the Giant is good and drunk you get a giant bomb and try to explain to the Giant to roll the bomb towards the gates. This doesn't work... the Giant's too drunk. So a clever Goblin shaman thinks up of an idea... he orders the Greenskins to paint a squig onto the bomb. Now, while the Giant doesn't know what a bomb is, he does recognize a squig. So they tell him to throw the "squig" at the door. This works and blows open the door, which makes the Dwarfs just pissed, and they all come rushing out in huge waves, which the Greenskins now need to fight. Wave after wave, until finally this big Dwarf hero comes out, and you fight and kill him, ending that cycle of the public quest. As you were fighting the big hero, the Dwarfs were closing their big gate you blew open, and the whole public quest starts over again. Sounds pretty sweet to me.

Anyway, back to PvP having an impact (told you this would be rambling). The final huge goal of PvP is to take and pillage your enemy's capital. Again, while it's only temporary, it has a real impact. The people are forced to flee, those that remain can be killed, and it opens up tons of new things to do, like public quests, normal quests, instances and a bunch of other really cool things. They even talk about it a little on this podcast.

Another thing that I like about PvP for WAR is that there will be a lot of different Scenarios. Scenarios are WAR's version of Battlegrounds, instanced goal based combat which rewards the players inside and makes it roughly fair (equal players, close to similar levels, etc). Personally I'm expecting no less than one scenario, per tier, for the first three tiers and at least three scenarios on the final tier (one in the middle, one on each of the normally controlled zones, with possibly more available after a capital is captured). This means per battlefront I'm expecting a minimum of six, or eighteen total on release. This is a far cry from Blizzards depressing four BGs over the course of three years released and a previous four years of development. Now, I'm not expecting each Scenario to be unique, but to me, playing a game of capture the flag in different terrain would be enough. Being able to swap around to a different land type or something with a slightly different gimmick (such as one I've heard about has trolls in it, throwing rocks down at people) would be enough. Variety is the spice of life, and WoW is sorely lacking in this department.

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Next is how WAR will deal with healers. One of the longstanding complaints and requests for chang by many is that healing is boring and should be more reliant on doing damage. While I've long opposed this view, because I firmly believe that everyone has their own thing they enjoy doing, thus those who enjoy healing in it's current form in WoW should be allowed to continue doing this. You shouldn't go into WoW and completely alter healing, since that would leave those who enjoy and have invested time in those roles with something they may not want to do.

WAR on the other hand is giving the people who want more combative healers what they want, and is building it into the game from the ground up. Unlike WoW where every class has the ability to DPS, but it's separate from the role of healing, they are putting some synergy into the system. The simplified way of explaining it is that most of the support classes build up some sort of power through combat, which then improve the power and reduce the casting time. Yes it will be possible for these healers to not do any damage and just heal, but they will be very weak and unable to properly assist their allies without smashing faces or blasting foes.

I remember reading a post over at Warhammer Alliance where someone had played a Goblin Shaman. At first he just tried healing, only to find that his spells were weak and took long to cast (around five seconds). Then he started using his Shaman nukes, and noticed a bar filling up. His WAAAGH! bar, and when it got full it glowed as did his healing spells. He then noticed that his healing spells would take only about a second or two and were much more powerful, healing half or more of his allies health.

(EDIT: Found the link for the post on Goblin Shamans)

Other classes such as the Warrior Priest (Empire), and Disciple of Khaine (Dark Elf) use a similar system, while the Chaos Zealot and the High Elf Archmage use a system based around draining their enemies and using that power to heal their allies. The only class that doesn't seem to follow this system is the Dwarven Runepriest, which excel at pre-combat buffs, and in combat fighting power. I expect their in-combat heals to be equally effective all the time, but based on their descriptors I also expect their combat potential (both physical and magical) to be strong enough that it would be a folly to not wade into combat (but we shall see).

Two videos concerning the healers:
Podcast (watch around the middle)
Youtube video

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One of the last things I can think of that I really like about WAR is it's simplicity of class design. While yes there are twenty-four individual classes (four for each race) each one falls into a different role for each race. There is one tanking class, one healing/support class, one melee DPS class and one ranged DPS. There is no need to balance each class against all the others, merely balance them within their role. And while there will be variable ways to play and customize a given class within it's role (detailed here, here, and here) there is one core concept a class is built around.

One of the biggest flaws in WoW, I believe is each class has too much flexibility. No class has one defined role (beyond what players assign), but then each class needs each tree to be balanced against other trees, but also need to consider how those changes will affect the other trees in that class, not to mention how those changes will effect PvP and PvE. Good lord that was a run-on sentence. But I wanted put it all in one thought to emphasize how much is needed to be done per class.

To hell with all that rubbish! Each class in WAR only needs to be compared to the other classes of the same archetype in WAR. Each class only needs to be compared to 5 other classes and balanced as such because they will be very different than the other roles as they should be!


Well that covers everything that really stands out in my mind. Hope you've enjoyed it.

Why do you fight?

So as of late I've been in a funk. Got my Druid to the late 40s, but it's been a long time since anyone's done an arena match, which slowed down my desire to level the job. Since then I've been watching and reading a lot of the information on Warhammer Online (WAR) and it's got me really jonesing to play it.

This has gotten me thinking about why I suddenly lack such a strong enthusiasm to level up my druid for PvP, but really want to PvP in WAR. They are both just PvP, right? Not really, at least for me. For me, it's a matter of why do I fight?

In WoW, one PvPs to get gear, so you can PvP more (either more easily or at higher ranks in Arena if that's your cup of tea). There are two types of players that this model of PvP really appeals to:

• The Loot as Reward playerbase. You do PvP, you get epics. In fact it is one of the most surefire ways to gear yourself up. There may be some luck involved but you know by a certain time frame you will be decked out in all Season 1 epics, ignoring the potential gear from doing Arenas.
  
• The "I just like to PvP" playerbase. These are the players for whom fighting human opponents is the ultimate thrill and is where it's at. As detailed in Rohan's post here, the gear is merely there as a reward for the LaR players. For those who just like to PvP, you get gear to equalize everything else, and leave only skill and personal choices (like class and talent builds) to differentiate the great from the good. Challenging people and fighting in an arena match or in battlegrounds is the fun itself.

Now, for players of these types, WoW gives them everything they want, and plans on expanding that with the release of WotLK and the implementation of Lake Wintergrasp.

But that's not enough for me. I need a reason to fight beyond just fighting and beyond better gear. Let's take raiding for example. I go into Karazhan, and lead my guild on a merry killing spree through the whole thing. We get loot and kill more and get loot, but why? Ah, there's a good "why" here. I kill and get loot to see more.

As of right now I've beaten about 10 bosses more than I ever figured I'd see in this expansion. Going in, I decided I wouldn't worry about leaving my guild and joining a big raiding guild. I was fine with seeing what ever it is I could see. If I never stepped foot in Kara, so be it. The fact that my guild was able to push through Karazhan, and will some day probably move onto Zul'Aman and possibly 25-man raids is just gravy.

Anyway, watching the information on WAR, like how all the scenarios (the WAR equivalent of Battlegrounds) and quests and everything will add to the war effort of trying to capture the next zone, which all leads up to making an attack on your opponent's city. Realizing that things inside BGs and the like can have an amazing effect on the game at large makes all my efforts grinding honor and the like seem hollow and pointless.

So at this point I'm at a dividing point. Either way, it'll just be a time filler until WAR comes out. Either I continue to PvP in WoW as filler, or I work on playing DAoC and PvP there. Now, DAoC may be somewhat outdated, but conceptually it has the closest to what I want in PvP. The (so-called) RvR has fighting over keeps and relics and stuff. I haven't decided which way I'll go, but I'm thinking about both.

Anyway, whatever I decide, it's just a matter of time until I can play WAR and get what I really want. (Oh yeah, and the Tome of Knowledge looks ridiculously delicious.)

So as a final question to any of my readers, why do you fight? For gear? For the thrill of battle? To see more? Just to be with friends? There is no right or wrong answer, just different ones.

Why I dislike RMT and in-game currency farmers

I apologize for disallowing comments on this one. I don't want to start any hoopla about it. Real-Money-Trading and in-game currency farmers are probably one of the top 5 hot button subjects for MMO players. Just go over to Tobold's and do a search for RMT related articles (BTW, Tobold's is a great blog and was one of the primary inspirations to start my own). In the end, this post is merely me venting my opinions for people to read if they want.

I've been steadily playing MMOs for approximately 4 years now. I had played them prior to this, but at the time I was in the Army, and was unable to get good long-term internet access (I would end up playing EQ for a couple months at a time before I would stop playing due to moving or going on a field exercise or something). Shortly after I left the Army, Final Fantasy XI was released, and thanks to the prompting of the artists of the webcomics MacHall and Real Life, I started playing and joined their Linkshell, Shirtninjas.

Prior to this time, RMT was a minor problem. Most of it was done via services like eBay, and the like, done from person to person. Approximately a year or a little more prior to the U.S. release of FFXI, IGE came into existence. I would imagine a few other companies of a similar nature also appeared along with it, but IGE is the big name on the block. The result of IGE and other RMT companies effects on MMOs is already very well known. The market for hiring and employing (even if only by "Contract" which many RMT companies use to get around direct legal action for "employing" those who break the EULA) in-game currency farmers (ICF). Here's where my first issue lies:

1) ICFs will monopolize single high-value targets or reduce the availability of targets high-value farming areas: The impact of this one has gone down greatly since WoW and the Burning Crusade was released, but it's still there.

First I'll touch on the second portion, since that applies to WoW much more than the other. Let's use the Elemental Plateau as an example. Most folks at 70 know of the Elemental Plateau in Nagrand. It's a place where Elementals of the four prime elements appear, and is intended to be a good place to hunt motes of the appropriate element. The problem is that each of the Elementals appear in fairly limited quantities and their spawn rate is intentionally limited (as opposed to a dynamic spawn rate, which I will detail later). I would be willing to bet that on every server at least one person up on the Elemental Plateau is an ICF. For every ICF up there, that means one less "real person" is able use the Plateau to farm.

One thing that Blizzard added in The Burning Crusade that lowered the impact of ICFs upon farming is Dynamic Spawning. Dynamic Spawning works as such: The more players in a given area, killing mobs will increase the spawn rate for those mobs. This is limited in who it works on, but for the mobs that are effected by it, it strongly decreases the impact that ICFs have upon player farming.

The other point is one that, essentially, does not exist in WoW, but does exist in previous MMOs. There were things called "Named Monsters" or NMs. The WoW equivalent are Rare monsters. The primary difference is that the rewards from NMs were easily much better than equal level gear, and in some later cases the best available anywhere. This was fine as a design not taking into account ICFs, but with their introduction they were, in many cases, able to claim a virtual monopoly on NMs, forcing players from either using them to make money themselves or farm the items directly, thus bypassing the need to save up large amounts of money to buy the item.

Either way, ICFs make life a lot harder for people who honestly are trying to make money.

Now, onto the second point. This was not obvious at first. In fact, it didn't really become obvious until the first "Christmas sale" by companies like IGE. As I mentioned in the previous post, at winter vacation time there is usually a surplus of people getting money and RMT companies lowering prices. This leads to a flood of money going from RMT bank characters who hold onto huge amounts of money to the economies on the servers they are on.

I'm no economist, but I'm able to figure out what that means. Let's say at Christmas, 5,000,000g enters the economy of each server. This is not so far fetched, since (doing a bit of searching) shows that current gold prices are around $250-500 for 5,000g. After the holiday price drop, we can estimate the max cost for 5,000g at $300 (and probably less), and I could easily see someone purchasing one or two of those with Holiday gift money. While a portion of this will be siphoned out through the act of buying an epic flyer, anyone who does the Netherwing faction quests will negate this loss by at least two-fifths, meaning that still a large amount of money is suddenly entering the economy.

So what's does it matter if a lot of money is entering the economy over a short period of time? Well, I'll use a Wikipedia article to sum it up, "Mainstream economists overwhelmingly agree that high rates of inflation are caused by high rates of growth of the money supply." Simply put, it will likely cause strong inflation. The average price on things bought from the AH will rise by a noticeable amount, and those who do not RMT will suffer because of it. So here's the core problem:

2) RMT companies do not consider what impact their selling of in-game currency will have on the economies of the game servers. When someone buys their money, they expect it promptly, and RMTs usually deliver it as such. While I would imagine that, generally, business remains predictable, during key periods such as Christmas, the demand for RMT goes up, and the response has a noticable impact.

Money floods the economy as hundreds and possibly thousands of people per server order and are given money. This impacts their buying habits at the AH (much more willing to pay whatever it takes to get what they need since they have money to burn), and as a consequence impacts how other people price what they sell and how much they are willing to pay for stuff (also willing to pay more).

In a simplified way of saying it, a sharp increase in the total value of money in the economy will cause temporary inflation. Over the course of a year, RMTs will use IMFs to siphon small amounts of money out of the economy. Since more money is entering the economy as this happens (and probably more money is entering it than leaving it), it doesn't have a noticeable impact on the server's overall economy. Then at the end of the year, much in-game currency is bought at once, causing the hoarded money to flood into the economy, raising general prices on the AH. While over time this inflation spreads money out amongst everyone (higher prices at the AH mean eventually everyone gets more money), the more immediate effect is newbie players on older servers are essentially cut off from buying things they cannot produce, either for wearing or for crafting (e.g. leather needed for crafting guns for engineering).

Now, this problem has been somewhat mitigated on WoW, due to the prevalence of Auctioneer. Since Auctioneer tracks previous sales, it won't cause a single person selling very high to skew it's numbers. On the other hand in other games that don't have things like Auctioneer, such as FFXI, it has a strong impact. I've seen many times, right after Christmas, the prices soar very noticeably.

Final point:
3) RMTs don't care how the money they acquire is gotten.

The way I've phrased this is fairly innocent sounding. As I mentioned back in December, it seemed like there had been a recent flood of WoW account hacking, along with the FFXI site hacking (inserting a trojan virus onto a few major FFXI sites which then downloaded itself onto anyone's computer that went to the site, leading to hacked accounts). While I can't back up with facts that these hacked accounts were used to fund RMT companies, the strong increase during this period (including at least 4 people in my guild) paints that picture to me.

But this point stands on it's own, even without the theory of RMTs using account hacking to acquire funds. The point is simply that I doubt companies like IGE don't ask where the money comes from. Even if they were to ask, there's no guarantee that it is "legit" (as much as that can be). They need to get the currency to their clientèle, so they make sure enough is available to meet the demand.

Again, I have no hard evidence of it, I firmly believe that many RMT companies use ill-gotten funds (ignoring the illegality of any RMT in games with EULA that ban it) to supply their customers.

Games like Second Life are less impacted, due to there being a legal method for transferring real money to in-game money and the other way around. For games like this, they were designed with RMTing in mind, thus they are not overly adversely impacted by them.

Sony also did something similar to this with the introduction of the Station Exchange servers, which allowed players to create or transfer characters to specific servers that "allowed" RMTing. And by "allow" I mean that SOE created their own RMT group and supplied all the funds and gear you could normally buy, but did it in-house and on servers separate from everyone else, again minimizing it's effect on the rest of the game.

While I dislike RMTs, games or servers designed with RMTing built in are perfectly acceptable (I won't play them, but that's beside the point). In the three ways I mentioned above, RMTs and ICFs have a profound impact on games that are not designed with RMTs in mind. While for a percent of the gaming population (I do not pretend to know how much) benefits from it, it comes at the expense of other's enjoyment. None of what we do in MMOs are on a "need" basis, so doing things that harm others enjoyment of the game in a way not part of the experience is not even close to acceptable to me.